What do we achieve by focusing on words instead of focusing on the substance of the problem?
Unhoused may be because homeless covers people living in homes. But I'm not arguing this case because I don't trust that's a real issue you're raising given the others.
> Interpol argues that the term 'pig butchering' dehumanizes and shames victims of such frauds, deterring people from coming forward to seek help and provide information to the authorities."
There you go.
You're arguing this like this is instead of, rather than alongside, targeting criminals.
How victims feel and how likely they are to report issues is important. If you called fraud "scammed an idiot" would you get as many people reporting? Pig butchering is a shockingly dehumanising term.
My understanding of the word homeless depends on the fact that someone has no home. Can you expand on what you mean?
adjective plural noun: the homeless; adjective: homeless (of a person) without a home, and therefore typically living on the streets.
So those would actually describe different things. Not everyone uses them consistently either tho to make things more confusing ;)
If you're sleeping in a homeless shelter, isn't that a place you have to sleep? Are you now not homeless?
"Rough sleeper" is the term for sleeping on the streets. That helps a key distinction between people who don't have a place they can rely on and people sleeping under bridges. Both are bad outcomes but require different handling.
It's tricky, but it is important to have terms that we can use for lots of technical things.
Own your place? You're golden.
Rent officially? Probably have good tenant protection laws.
Anything else is subject to circumstances which might change with short notice. If you're crashing on a friends' couch you're one disagreement or girlfriend away from being kicked out.
I would not consider someone homeless who chooses to couch surf around friends’ pads for a while as they figure out something permanent, but has options and means, certainly not homeless
A "digital nomad" that crashes on a different friend's couch, possibly in different countries even every month by choice is not really homeless.
Someone that can't afford / find a place other than a friend's couch or their car is homeless. Even if he's not completely shelterless. Same with a homeless person sleeping in a homeless shelter. They have shelter. But no home. This one gets more complicated in terms of the wording because some of these homeless people have been doing it for so long that they actually seem to prefer to be home and shelterless in some cases. Sometimes they don't really prefer sleeping in a church entrance during sub-zero (C) but they prefer it over the rules or company in the homeless shelter (e.g. alcohol / pet related). These are many of the "living in the streets" people my parent commenter thought were the only ones that count as homeless I suppose.
We can argue about whether or not that's true, but it seems to be at least not just cosmetic in intent.
That is probably not why Interpol wants that though.
And I agree with you about the other examples.
Ice on the cake are the 13 year olds which use the “wrong” party political hashtag and get their house raided.
This isn't unique to programming
If you kiss someone who doesn't want to be kissed then you've sexually assaulted them but you've definitely not raped them
There's a few different cases here, but the general principle is that, for many people, words carry emotional or semantic connotations, and we want to use different words to manage these connotations.
1) For the "sexual assault vs. rape" case - Some words may be more unpleasant for many people to hear. Many people may find the word "rape" to evoke more unpleasant emotions than the more muted "sexual assault," so may use the latter in situations where we prefer not to elicit a strong emotional reaction, such as in a professional or therapeutic environment.
2) For the other cases - many people find certain terms more dehumanizing than others. With the homeless example, many people feel that "homeless" has become not just a descriptive term, but a term that carries connotations such as "crazy," "disgusting," "failed," and maybe above-all, "other" - outside the realm of people we consider "us". In contrast, the term "unhoused" carries more of a connotation of a temporary state a person is in, rather than an inherent label or trait of that person.
There is certainly a treadmill phenomenon to this - in a few years, if "unhoused" catches on, and if homeless people are still dehumanized, it's likely that the word will take on a dehumanizing connotation and many will seek to replace it.
> What do we achieve by focusing on words
All that said, while I think language is important, I do agree with you that there is an excessive focus on language and an inadequate focus on actual solutions. I would say that the current economic system and power structures make solving these problems very very hard, and as a result many people focus on policing and adjusting language because it is something that they feel they can actually change.
IMHO the action being described evokes an extremely strong emotion, and therefore so too should the word we use.